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For the past year Azure Mobile Services has come a long way. From adding easy access to making custom API’s and table scripts to combining push notifications and identity management. However, this past December Mobile Services has a new name, App Services. App Services now contains, Web Apps, Mobile Apps, Logic Apps and API Apps. With App service you get the following benefits:

Intuitive SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows, as well as cross-platform frameworks like Xamarin, and Cordova

Extend your mobile backend with custom code by leveraging App Service Mobile .NET or Node.js server side SDK, or directly via REST frameworks for other languages supported on App Service including PHP, Java, or Python

Cross-platform push notifications to iOS, Android, Windows, Kindle and other devices (this capability is also available as a separate service: Notification Hubs)

You are probably saying “that is great, but what does this have to with Azure Mobile Services”. Well it is because you want to use the new App Service model for your development. If you are starting a new project, clicking through and building a service using App Service is easy and straightforward. Here is a video that shows how to get up and running in no time.

However, what if you have invested your time and effort into Azure Mobile Services? How can it benefit from all of these awesome features? Well, it starts with Migrating to Azure App Services! You might say that migrating has always be a pain or even black magic. In some instances it has. However, with the Migration Tool for Mobile Services it makes it pretty easy and straight forward.

A few things to note before you attempt to migrate.

If you “MIGRATE” your site, there will be no code changes needed to your scripts.

If you “UPGRADE” your site, you will have to make code changes to your scripts to take advantage of the new mobile SDK.

In this post we are going to talk about MIGRATION.

The next thing to note is what tier you are on with your current Mobile Services and how many do you have. If you are on Free or Basic and have multiple mobile services, all of them will be migrated. If you only want one migrated you will have to “upgrade” to the standard tier. Here are the steps to do that.